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Tuesday, 21 February 2012

Unfeasibly excited

Having been a total technical dunce since forever and a day and having made my templates by drawing with pen, tippexing out errors, printing out text, cutting it out and sticking it onto the templates and then photocopying, I made this this morning. Yes, all my myself. It's not an actual template for an actual Union Jack block but will be once I've tweaked the measurements. And will form the basis of my lesson at the Fat Quarterly Sewing Retreat in London in June.

It occurred to me yesterday in a Eureka moment that these days the best and cheapest new software(s) are apps. So I hunted around and downloaded TouchDraw for iPad for £5.99 and drew this within the first half hour, from a standing start. I have NEVER used any of this kind of software EVER before EVER, that's how easy this was to use. So all your appaholics out there, are there any great apps I need to know about? I'd like one for my macbook which will replace Piknic when that vanishes soon - some kind of photoshop-type programme but not trillions of wonga. So I can tweak my photos, make mosaics, add text, re-shape them into blog headers, buttons etc. Just a bit more than what iphoto does really.

31 comments:

I am intrigued by touch draw for paper piecing templates. I use photoshop elements, £30-40 so quite cheap, a bit of help is needed getting the hang of layers etc but there is a lot of free help online, tutorials etc

But there's a great program called Paint.net which is an open source photoshop a like, which I use a lot ... it's really easy and FREE ... I teach with it ..

I was never that fussed with Picnik ... it took ages and I don't think it's versatile enough to merit using up my bandwidth ... Anyway, Google say that they're going to be replacing it with something equally good if not better ... so panic not!

I second sarah's recommendation of picassa or paint.net. Picassa is brilliant for all the high level polishing type of things, so many features youll never even get around to using and FREE!. Paint.net is a bit more techy, like photoshop, but is fantastic for quick resizing, cropping, colourwork etc, and also FREE!

But tell me, if you are using a mac, why aren't you using Aperture? I am contemplating buying a mac purely for that program!

with Picasa you can make mosaics, add text, do minor color adjustments. It's a free program. It's how I make all my mosaics. I also use photoshop Elements 9.0 for all my scrapbook making and real photo adjustments.

I just decided to spring to photoshop elements and see how it goes. I'm a little concerned about the learning curve but I'll get it eventually. Illustrator is what I really want to get but for that I definitely would want to take a class.

Glad to hear that TouchDraw worked for you! :-) Please don't hesitate to write if you run into any issues or have questions.

As an FYI (since you mentioned your a Mac user), I just wanted to let you know that we're very close to having a Mac version of TouchDraw done as well. If all goes well we hope to have it available for sale in the Mac App Store in the next 4 to 6 weeks.

I had a lot of fun digitising my blighty patterns trying to make sure I had the Union Jack dimensions correct. Not as easy as it first think. http://www.intelligentquilting.com/utility/showProduct/index.cfm?objectID=143&parentkw=506

Don't know anything about the technical stuff so congrats on the design.About the Union Jack pattern itself, I believe the two white lines on either side of the diagonal red line are supposed to have different widths:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Flag